Businesses publish their prices and hide their availability, deliberately
The same 40 businesses publish monthly prices at 66.7% and live availability at 10%. 54% have no booking system at all.
- How it was measured
- Two screens over the same unbiased sample, run four days apart, testing prices and then availability. Verified the one platform that does expose availability by querying it directly, then read its terms.
- Evidence current as of
We tested whether a category of small businesses publishes its prices. They do — 66.7%. Then we tested whether the same businesses publish live availability. 10%.
Same businesses. Same websites. Same fetchers. Four days apart.
Why the two differ
A price is marketing. It is a shelf label, and posting it is how the business gets considered at all. In this market the monthly rate is the headline product, so it is on the homepage.
Availability is operations. It is inventory, and these businesses keep it behind a phone call on purpose, because a long booking is a relationship they want a conversation about.
54% of reachable businesses had no booking engine at all. The most common phrasing on the sites that did route somewhere was a variant of "contact our friendly staff". Those are the same fact seen twice.
The one system that exposes it forbids the use
A single booking platform did expose availability cleanly: no stay-length cap, live per-unit inventory, no key required, about a second per call. We cross-validated it — a 90-night total matched the operator's own published rate card to the dollar.
Its terms prohibit exactly this. Verbatim: "Monitor the Site's availability, performance or functionality for any competitive purpose", and "Override any security feature or bypass or circumvent any access controls". The workaround needed to reach one chain's parks is the second clause.
Coverage would have been 15-20%, on one vendor, against its written terms. That is a licensing conversation, not a data project.
The general form
If you are building anything that needs both a price and an inventory position, test the inventory leg first. It is the one that fails, and passing the price test tells you nothing about it — we had a confirmed candidate for four days on the strength of a test that could not see the problem.
The cheap tell costs one afternoon: look for a booking calendar, an availability indicator, or a stock figure. If what you find instead is a contact form and a phone number, that is the answer.
Tracked in our ledger as INVENTORY-IS-KEPT-PRIVATE, RV-AVAILABILITY-DEAD. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say what changed.